Sunday, December 23, 2012

My greatest extravagance is experience, and the only thing
on which I spend money with no hope of ever getting it back is travel. My kind
of travel is unusual and, by necessity, almost always solitary. To travel fast,
and to travel on rare cheap deals, requires the ability to decide immediately
and to decide only for myself. I don’t expect I will always have the freedom
(and the disposable income) to travel like this; I also don’t take cheap,
ubiquitous, fast long-range travel for granted. We may never run out of usable
fuel (and possibly not even fossil fuel within my lifetime), but airlines can
go bankrupt, I can lose my income, and to be perfectly honest, I just don’t
have enough vacation time to travel as much as I would like. So until I’ve seen
every place I want to see in my life, I do my best to avoid backtracking.

Barcelona is an exception.

Columbus pointing at Travelcat.

The early-morning shuttle service takes me from my hotel
straight to Budapest airport, where the WiFi is good enough to stock up on
entertainment. The Malev jet takes a relatively short hop across the
Mediterranean to deposit me in the Catalan capital’s airport, and I grab the
bus into town. The ride along the Spanish hills is beautiful, but once we reach
the city, the traffic gets very bad very quickly. An annoying amount of time
later (but still early in the day), I’m at Placa Catalunya, the main hub of
touristy Barcelona, with my netbook out, trying to figure out what the address,
phone number and actual location of my AirBNB host is. Even at the tail end of
September, Barcelona is crawling with tourists, and hotels were prohibitively
expensive – but AirBNB came through, and I got a cheap, very simple room in an
excellent location. A five-minute walk away, I find the right door just off a
jeweler’s shop. It’s a lot of stairs to the apartment, but I politely refuse
the host’s help: the imperative to always haul my bags up to the room myself is
a great motivation to avoid over-packing. Neither am I disappointed with the
fact that my window opens onto an air shaft: this city does not sleep when I
would sleep, and I didn’t come to Barcelona to look at it out of a window.

I start at La Rambla, the main tourist street, after passing
a New Rock Boots showroom (not as cool in real life as they are on the company
website; my best choice for skull-stomping boots remains the home brand Aipi).
It is the one bit of Barcelona that I remember well from my last visit – a few
brief stopovers during a package holiday spent mostly at Calella, one of a
string of beach towns all along the Catalan coast. It was four years prior,
almost to the day. A few months after my surgery, once I’d already lost a whole
lot of weight, I got kicked out of the office on a three-week holiday that the
company was tired of keeping on the books; so I went online and booked the trip
that filled the time as much as possible. Through a bit of poor foresight, I
ended up on a bus ride from Tallinn to Barcelona – four days each way. It was
indeed a once-in-a-lifetime experience, in an “I won’t be doing that again in
this lifetime” way. But Catalonia was worth the return.

On the other side of La Rambla, I pass the Christopher
Columbus statue and walk across the series of ultramodern bridges to the
shopping mall on a pier on the middle of the bay. It wasn’t here the last time
I came, and while I admire the architecture, I don’t hang around – I am much
more interested in the nearby Barcelonita quarter, and the beginning of the
city’s beach. I make a note of the Frank Gehry Fish in the distance, then
backtrack to the subway. It’s high noon, and I’m determined to tick off a great
world church.

I’d only seen the Sagrada Familia from the outside, and very
briefly, on my last visit. It’s progressed a lot in the meantime, and I take my
time. I don’t have the background or the vocabulary to accurately describe the
impression of that structure, particularly stunning because of its location in
the middle of an otherwise unremarkable housing ward. More than any other
religious structure, it is testament not to the power of a deity but to the
power of mankind, of imagination, perseverance, and beauty. Despite the overt
Christian symbology, God is the last thing you wonder at in that building.

I spend another couple of hours walking along the streets of
Barcelona, picking a destination at random and not being too disappointed when
the grounds of the old mental hospital turn out to be sealed off. I return to
the apartment, and soon set out for dinner. I start out along the Rambla Raval –
a smaller, more authentic neighborhood version of the ubiquitous Spanish
pedestrian promenade, complete with a tenement building taken over by hippies
and covered in counterculture slogans. I keep walking, consulting my guidebook,
until I get to a particularly recommended (but not particularly expensive) restaurant
and tick off another Barcelona checkpoint by having some truly outstanding
paella.